A Flying Visit
by meldahlie
Summary: What is the festive season without a murder mystery, a costume drama and a happy ending? Lacking the time and energy to commit the dastardly deed myself, I borrowed one of Agatha Christie's. An epilogue, of sorts, for 'The Moving Finger.'


A Flying Visit

"_...and so I agreed with Miss Emily that it was all for the best..." _

An epilogue for Agatha Christie's "The Moving Finger."

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_A/N: This epilogue is for the novel, which was set comfortably in the 1930's. The Joan Hickson film was shifted most uncomfortably to the 1950's. I pass no comment. I just wrote this instead.  
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_A/N-2: My muse is currently in seclusion with a large box of Kleenex due to bereavement, but as I wrote this ages ago, for Christmas, here you are._

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The Moving Finger writes, and having writ moves on, and the characters caught in its briefly dazzling limelight of anonymous letters and double murder return quietly to the shadows of obscurity. But life, like the moving finger, moves on too. If we have not quite forgotten our friends, it may be interesting to take one more peep behind the curtain, and see how Lymstock fares in these dangerous days; to see it, perhaps, as Jerry Burton sees it, whirling his way through on one of his brief trips home on leave from the RAF. 'Flying visits,' as his waiting wife calls them.

Here then, is Lymstock, although for the duration of the present emergency no sign announces the town, and the church bells will ring only in the event of - - - you know what. At the station too, all name signs are gone. The vending machine from which Megan bought the bar of chocolate before her sudden trip to London is empty, and the railway posters for holidays on the Sunny Southern Line are replaced by warnings that Careless Talk Costs Lives and Gas Masks Must Be Carried. The station master has grown a little greyer, the troop trains go through but never stop, that is all. Let us go on.

Here is Lasher's, who still have baby pigs, now with the addition of three land girls to care for them. Two were London secretaries, one a Scottish farm lass; all three drive Farmer Lasher nearly to distraction and scandalise the town with their make-up, liquid stockings and occasional black-market cigarettes. The shortage they, like the native Beatrices and Roses, complain most about is that of Young Men. Mr Ledbetter's Tom is somewhere in the Far East; Fred from the garage is laying tank tracks in North Africa. No 'walking out' couples are to be found speechless in hedges around Lymstock these days.

Here, behind its untrimmed hedge, for labourers are hard to find these days and the odd-jobbing gardeners grow older, is the Women's Institute hall, still in proud possession of its distinguished typewriter. The hall is a livelier place at present, with ARP meetings and first aid clubs competing for time and space with the amateur dramatics and mothers' meetings, themselves enlivened by the "'vaccies."

Around the bend and down the long slow hill, and here is the town itself. Every house has its blackouts to go with its evacuees, including even the vicarage, where Mrs Dane-Calthrop drifts alarmingly and unexpectedly through the lives of the three mothers-and-babies billeted there, in addition to the rest of the parish. The vicar himself seems practically unaware of these additions to his household. The War has not altered his absent-mindedness one jot, although it has brought to mind a whole new set of incomprehensible Latin quotations, this time about War.

The butchers, the grocers, the International Stores: all these are unchanged in appearance without, despite strict rationing within. Further along the high street, Mr Pye is coming out of the bakers. The cherubic countenance, pink as ever, conceals a raging turmoil of domestic worries. His temple of aesthetic taste at Priory Court is now invaded by an ever-changing succession of aesthetic friends briefly escaping London and the air raids, and an ever-present riot of six evacuee children and a live-in 'Home Help.' Old Colonel Appleton is also on the high street, stumping along in Home Guard uniform, brandishing his cane in search of anybody willing or unwilling to listen to about "Huns!" and "Prussians!" and "Japs!"

At the solicitor's, Miss Ginch is back in charge, this time for the firm of Galbraith, Galbraith & Hood. Mr Hood is a pleasant young lawyer, a soldier from Dunkirk with only one leg to show for it. The name 'Symmington' is no longer mentioned in Lymstock, except in faint churnings of forgotten gossip. The War, and the trials of the Home Front fully occupy the grist mill of the village stalwarts like Mrs Baker and Mrs Lygon. The two Symmington boys have vanished to an evacuated boarding school and the care of their northern grandparents in the holidays, while the old house belongs to a well-to-do couple from Eastbourne.

Further on, to the red-brick terraces and here, venturing out in the sunshine, is little Miss Emily Barton, home again from her travels now mines and U-boats make cruises unsafe. There is no denying that she goes out and about in town less than she used to, nor that Dr Griffith calls more regularly at this house than before, nor that faithful Florence is more grim and devoted in her care than ever. But little Miss Emily remains as shyly bright and wistfully hopeful as ever, taking an old-maidenly interest in the doings of her 'young friends' and always, always being delighted to open the photograph albums of her travels. The cruise around the world is the light of her life, and has left her with _so many_ correspondents. The two missionary sisters from the initial P&O out to India; the kind doctor's wife from Hong Kong, the consular secretary's wife from Trinidad...

To all these, and others beside, go out the quavering letters, regardless of the delays in war-time postal services. And, of course, never to be forgotten for a moment, there is always dear, splendid, Aimee. Dear Aimee has not returned to Lymstock and her busy life. The cruise around the world was as dangerous as old wives tales often predict. A Mr Rutherford, tall, dark, American, boarded the ship from Japan with them. By the time San Francisco had been reached, it was quite clear Aimee would not be coming home. She is somewhere in California at present. Mr Rutherford's business and the War detains them near the American Pacific fleet. Earnest letters of Miss Emily's on church and village affairs flow one way, parcels of raisins, tinned ham and dried eggs flow back the other.

But Doctor Griffith is not alone since his sister's emigration; indeed, there are some who would whisper that he is a happier man now than when his sister was here to pour his morning tea and organise his rounds. Clean and neat and pleasing to the eye, Joanna now pours at the doctor's house. Well-rationed tea for Owen, fresh farm milk for the little twin Griffiths, who delight their mother by being brother and sister and yet looking, unlike herself and Jerry or Owen and Aimee, almost exactly alike. Her crusading zeal these days is directed towards Owen's various lame ducks of poor children and old ladies in out-lying farms, while the Dig For Victory campaign has banished any uncertainty about when runner beans might be in season.

And here at last is Little Furze, still a comfortable Victorian villa set back from the road, although vegetables have invaded the lawn here too, and hens of outlandish names such as Goneril and Reagan scratch within the shrubbery. The sound of the car turning in onto the gravel drive is sufficient, long before the driver has time to sound the horn, to bring Megan and little Jerry and the world's first almost vegetarian Old English Sheepdog flying out to meet the Flying Visitor. Partridge lurks grimly in the background, waiting to bear little Jerry off should the excitement become too much for him.

And it happens; and the sheepdog follows too; and a quiet settles with the dust on Little Furze. And then the curtain must fall again, for there are just Jerry and Megan, standing together on the verandah of the white house; the white house where neither we nor anybody else are wanted now.


End file.
